By Manny Frishberg , JTNews Correspondent
George Gordon knew his younger sister was dead. When he was a 14-year-old Jewish resistance fighter in Warsaw, a comrade reported that the hospital Krystyna and their mother were working in had been destroyed, killing everyone inside. So, when as an older man in his 70s, the survivor of the Stuthoff and Buchenwald concentration camps, appealed to the Seattle office of the International Red Cross for help, all he was really hoping to find was their graves.
When the Polish Red Cross informed Tammy Kaiser, the local volunteer who coordinates searches for the IRC’s Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, that they had located Krystyna Budzynski alive and well, it was more like a miracle than a dream come true. In a short while, Tammy and her supervisor at the Red Cross, Valerie Gow, had George — born Jerzy Budzynski — and the sister he had not heard from since she was 12, on the phone with each other.
Up until that time, for almost 60 years, George had lived with the almost certain knowledge that he had been the sole survivor in his family of the Warsaw uprising.
“About 10 days after the outbreak I found out my father and brother were dead,” he said in a telephone interview earlier this month. They had been killed in action and buried in shallow graves in the soft ground of the family’s flowerbeds. Simple wooden crosses with their names burned into the wood marked their burial spot.
“The uprising in Warsaw lasted about two months,” he recalled. “Toward the end, about a week before the collapse, I found out from another Underground soldier that he was right across the street from where my mom and my sister were. He told me that nobody could possibly survive because he was right there and the whole street was wiped out. The Germans were taking off from the airport in Warsaw and bombing systematically, block by block and street by street. Everything was destroyed.”
It was more than a half-century later that he found out how they had survived. When they finally spoke she told him that she and their mother had been sent on an assignment from the hospital where they were working into downtown Warsaw.
When the Americans liberated Krystyna and her mother from the German forced labor camp they had been sent to, they were told that George was dead, since all the inmates at the Stuthoff camp had been killed by the Nazis before the Russians came.
Despite the fact that he felt he knew their fate, George said he began searching for his family as soon as he was liberated from Buchenwald at the end of World War II.
“A few years ago I ran into a friend and she was very dedicated to help me look for my sister,” said George. “Her sister was really expert on computers and she searched for me a lot for about two years. Finally, she contacted the American Red Cross here in Seattle and they contacted Warsaw, the Polish Red Cross. Altogether, they compared all the information that they had. Finally the Polish Red Cross found my sister and her family.”
Tammy Kaiser handles all of the World War II and Holocaust victims’ searches for the region. She has volunteered in this capacity for about four years, and says she has been able to find information on the missing relatives more than half the time. But, she added, in most cases, success means having located a gravesite or a death certificate — something that can bring her clients a sense of closure in their search. That was what George had come asking for, and what she had hoped to do.
Tammy was already planning to visit Warsaw on the March of the Living program, when shortly before her departure, the Polish Red Cross contacted her with the information that they had located the graves of his father and brother. They had been disinterred from the shallow grave in front of the house and reburied in a section of a large Warsaw cemetery reserved for those who had fought in defense of the country against the Nazis.
“At that time we had not found anything for his sister and his mother,” Tammy said, “but he was convinced that they had been killed in a bombing of a hospital in Warsaw.”
She said she did wander through a cemetery there, looking for signs of George’s other relatives, not realizing beforehand what a daunting task that would be.
“If you’ve ever tried to wander around a Polish cemetery looking for a grave, it doesn’t happen,” she told the Transcript, laughing at her own naïveté.
“These places are enormous. The cemetery I went to was just overwhelming, and,” she added, “not speaking Polish, I had no idea what I was doing.”
Then, a month after her return to Seattle, word came that the Polish Red Cross had located Krystyna, alive and well, living with her family in the southwestern city of Wroclaw (pronounced “Vrotswav”).
“My boss, Valerie at the Red Cross, called me up and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, It’s the most amazing news that could ever happen in this sort of a case,’” she recalled. “It was the first time in my working for the Red Cross that we had actually found anyone alive and done a reunion.
“When she said, ‘Krystyna is alive,’ I just about fainted,” said Tammy. “Even though I have tons and tons of names on my desk, I knew immediately who she was talking about.
“Within half an hour after giving him the news that his sister was alive, he was on the phone, talking to his sister. So, it was an amazing experience, hearing them connect for the first time, even though it was in Polish and I had no idea what they were saying, it was on speaker phone.”
With the help of some generous donations by individuals and organizations from the local Polish-American community, last summer George had a face-to-face reunion with the sister he had lost more than six decades earlier. On September 28th, 2003, George, his friend Cheryl, and Tammy Kaiser arrived in Wroclaw to see Krystyna and her family. As soon as she heard they were in her town, Krystyna insisted on coming to the hotel to meet them.
George said that after so many years, he could have passed her on the street and not known who she was, but he recognized her voice, which he said had barely changed at all.
At their first sight of each other, Tammy said, the pair was quiet and subdued, but sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant 10 minutes later, bickering about what to order, she said they really looked like brother and sister.
Tammy said literally millions of names — both of those who survived and those who did not —have been added to the database since the fall of the Iron Curtain and thousands more get added every day. The biggest challenge is finding help to get the information into the computers, where they can be included in the search.
“I have people call me who say, ‘Well I looked in 1995, there was nothing and I’ve never looked since.’ I think, my gosh, we’ve had millions of records since then,” said Tammy. “You need to look again. You just might find something.”
And George, unsurprisingly, could not be happier.
“I really owe so much to all of those people, people in the Polish Red Cross and the American Red Cross,” said George.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It’s changed my life completely. I’ve been pretty successful here, but I never could fully enjoy it because I so depressed all the time that I was the only survivor. All of a sudden, when I went to Poland to visit my sister, I have a big family now.”